Chapter Eighteen #2
“Should you, indeed?” Captain Hamer says slowly.
He doesn’t appear to expect an answer. Instead, he continues to look her over, suspicion growing in his eyes.
She grips the medal harder, drawing from it the strength to keep calm, to keep standing there as if nothing is amiss.
Inside, the fear grows claws. Can the captain tell?
Why is he looking at her like that, as if something about her doesn’t add up?
At last, Captain Hamer says, “We don’t hold with theft on this ship, lad.”
“Theft?” Bewildered, she takes a step toward the desk. Instantly, Withers draws his dirk again. Pointing it at her, he says, “Keep still.”
Captain Hamer says, “Thank you, Withers, but it’s hardly necessary.
Yes, theft. We don’t approve of it in the service.
You get to run the gauntlet for it. Do you know what that is, lad?
The men line up along the gangway and beat you as you pass through.
Very unpleasant. They tend to beat hard.
They don’t like a thief on board as they’ve nowhere to safely store their possessions. ”
“What…why…I didn’t…” she stammers.
“Those breeches are very fine for a boy like yourself. Buckskin, are they? I don’t have much of an eye for fashion, I admit, but they’re a gentleman’s pair I’d say. They’re far too big for you.”
The ship pitches heavily and she moves her hips, finding her balance. When she meets Captain Hamer’s eyes again, she sees he has noticed. Her mind reaches but finds nothing. What can she say? They belong to Jack? They’d hang her alongside him. “I…”
“You cannot account for your possession of them, can you? And what have you got there?” the captain says, waving his hand. “That thing you’re grasping around your neck.”
She opens her hand and looks down at George’s medal.
The silver glints in the sun dropping in through the stern windows.
The smell of coffee bores into her nose, sharp and bitter.
The captain has a silver pot on his desk.
She and George used to sit in the garden with a similar pot set on the wrought iron table, a porcelain cup decorated with forget-me-nots on each side.
The coffeepot was one of many wedding gifts.
“The breeches belonged to my father, sir,” she says slowly. “He died at Trafalgar. My mother can’t feed all six of us on her widow’s pension.”
The corners of Captain Hamer’s mouth lift. He looks almost relieved, as if he wanted her to be better than he believed she was. “Is that so? And that’s his Trafalgar medal, is it?”
“It is, sir. It was given to my mother afterward. She gave it to me to remember him by.”
“May I see it?”
She fumbles with the ribbon, fingers stiff with nerves. At last she hands the medal to the captain, who holds it up reverently before handing it back.
“Hm. I admire your spirit, boy, swimming across like that,” Captain Hamer says. “And your father served with Lord Nelson, did he?”
“Aboard the Neptune, sir,” she says, tying the ribbon around her neck again and praying Captain Hamer doesn’t know Captain Fremantle, who commanded the Neptune, or any of his fellow officers.
“As second lieutenant, sir,” she says. It would’ve been better to say as maintopman or as bosun’s mate or some other fairly anonymous position aboard a man-of-war, but they would not explain the expensive nature of the breeches she’s wearing.
“You seem an enterprising sort. You take after your father, I expect. I suppose it explains your manner of speech, too. I confess you had me confounded for a moment there, lad.”
Inside, she silently swears an oath Dick Pascoe would have been proud of. She hadn’t thought to change the way she spoke; she doesn’t even know how. She worries there are other things she missed in her hurry to get to Jack. What if her entire plan fails because of it?
Captain Hamer continues, “You’re a strong swimmer, you’ve shown that, but what else can you do? It’s experienced hands we want, not boys barely breeched.”
Isabel says, “I can sew and…and repair things.”
“You know carpentry?”
“A little. I’ve done jobs for my mother. And my father taught me some navigation, sir.” Another deep breath. “Please, sir. I’ll do anything.”
“He taught you navigation? You shall have to show me sometime what you know of it,” Captain Hamer says. “We’re about to get under way.”
Her voice rises dangerously with shock. “We are, sir?”
“Only to the next cove. We have some business to conclude here before we truly set sail. We shall sail to Gibraltar and from there to the East India station. How would you like to go to India, lad?”
“I should like it very much, sir,” she says truthfully. Sailing to India—it’s the stuff of dreams. With Jack at her side, maybe she could, she thinks. Together with him she could go anywhere.
Perhaps Captain Hamer hears the longing in her voice.
He says, “Well. You do look keen. That’s that, then.
I shall take you on as a ship’s boy for the duration of our next cruise.
Prove yourself worthy and you may make an able seaman yet.
” He rubs his chin, eyes on her. “Perhaps in time I could persuade a friend to admit you to his midshipmen’s berth.
Mine’s overfull, but I feel I must do something for the son of a fellow officer who fell at Trafalgar.
Hm. We shall see. For the moment, you’ll have a hammock, three meals a day, and your daily portion of grog.
You can send your pay home to your mother. ”
Turning to Midshipman Withers, he says, “Take him to the mizzen topmen, Withers, he’ll berth with them. Are you hungry now, lad?”
“Very, sir.”
“You’ll have your supper soon, when the watch changes.”
Captain Hamer takes his quill and writes something on the sheet of paper in front of him. Motioning with the quill, his eyes on the sheet, he says, “Now off with you. You’ve made a puddle on my carpet.”
She lingers by the door, awash in emotion.
Here’s the man who has condemned Jack to death without a trial, yet he is offering her three meals a day, a hammock to sleep in, the possibility of advancement.
No…not her; he’s offering these things to a poor boy who lost his father, a boy who’s hungry, who needs help supporting his widowed mother.
She opens her mouth to say something, but she worries the conflict between the hatred still balled in her chest and the cloak of warmth around it will spill out, so when the captain says a little irritably, “Off with you, I said!” she only says, “Thank you, sir,” and goes.
—
Midshipman Withers takes her onto the gun deck, where he introduces her to the mizzen topmen not currently on watch.
There are six of them squashed together in the space between the stored hammocks and the guns.
The hatches of the gunports are open. In the light falling through them, the men regard her warily until Withers mentions her father served with Lord Nelson at Trafalgar and the atmosphere somersaults.
They vow they’ll teach her the trade as her father would surely have wanted.
She may be a ship’s boy now, but she can be a topman like them in a year if she works hard.
“You’re not afraid of heights, are you?” says a man with the same kind of inked drawings on his arms as Dick Pascoe.
They ask her what ship her father was on. “The Neptune,” she whispers, looking down at her feet.
“You should get a pair of shoes made,” says the inked man. “Terry Burks, the gunner’s mate, makes a great pair if you’re willing to pay for it.”
A bright-haired man called Red Will, who’s whittling a piece of wood into a mermaid, says he has a cousin who was at Trafalgar. Soon he’s regaling the berth with stories.
“Captain Hamer is a good one,” Red Will says after a lengthy epos about the Battle of Copenhagen. “He’s a proper fighting captain, always after a prize. The only reason he hasn’t hoisted his blue yet is because they don’t know him well enough at the Admiralty.”
“He’d rather go after a Frenchie twice the size of our ship than toast king and country at some ball in London,” says the man with the inked drawings. “I ask you, which does more for winning the war?”
Red Will says, “This business with the smugglers may tip the balance. The Revenue Service has lost control of the situation. If our captain puts a stop to it, the Admiralty will reward him, I tell you.”
“That’ll be good for all of us,” says a man with a plait as long as Isabel’s was before Harriet cut it. “Though if he gets a first rate, we’ll be on blockade.”
“And if peace breaks out, God forbid, we’ll be cutting bricks ashore,” says the inked man.
“Let’s hope for neither,” Red Will grunts above his wooden mermaid.
Isabel only half listens to their conversation.
She must find a way to slip away. But how?
Her hands play with Richard’s cap as she thinks, but then the man with the long plait says, “Tell us more about your father at Trafalgar,” and she looks up to find all of them gazing at her.
Quietly, she says she prefers not to speak of him.
The man says, “Aww, come, give us a tale.”
But Red Will shoves him, saying, “Leave the mouse alone, Paddy. It’s no good losing one’s da.”
They call her Mouse after that, because she’s quiet as one. She’s glad, for it allows her to think instead of talk. She needs to find Jack. He’ll be locked up in the ship’s prison, the brig, she thinks—wherever that is. Somewhere on the lower deck or in the hold, maybe.
Slowly, her clothes dry. Jack’s clothes, she thinks.
She’s beginning to feel as if they are hers.
The men’s voices murmur around her; the sea sighs below the gunports.
Perhaps when these men go on watch, she’ll be able to get away.
But what if they notice? If they sound the alarm, if they start searching for her, she’ll lose her one chance to save Jack.
Her heart, mind, and everything in her strains for him.